


Eat me Up, Burn me Alive

by potterwatch



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Chronic Illness, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Light Depictions of Harm Related to Pararibulitis, Pararibulitis (Dirk Gently), Road Trip of Friendship, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-23 21:57:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20237125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potterwatch/pseuds/potterwatch
Summary: Amanda can't tell them apart for the first week.





	Eat me Up, Burn me Alive

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who just finished season one and has a lot of feelings about Amanda and the Rowdy 3? Set as though there's time between most of season one and the last 15 minutes of the season.

Amanda can’t tell them apart for the first week. Ok, she can tell them apart – there’s three with black hair and one who wears a scruffy beanie, and one with ice-blond hair that’s never even been threatened by gravity, but she doesn’t know which is which until they’re seven days on the road. The Rowdy 3 are too mobile, too chaotic for names to stick to them. Even after their chaotic first introductions, the names had slipped off and spun around until Cross was Gripps and Gripps was Vogel and the one with the bat was Martin.

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they kept her safe. One with an arm at her side, one painting her nails, one handing her a bat to bash in the police car. And he was her favorite, really, the leader, and she didn’t even feel bad about it because he was all of their favorites. Besides her. She loved them all – in an open, unconstrained way that she hadn’t even thought possible, even before the sickness, but he was the one who had found her, had looked at her in the eyes through a dirty windshield, and made any of it possible. She would always remember him for that, always hold a space in her heart just for him.

The first time an attack had come, when she was lying in the parking lot, burning alive, she had thought she’d really die that time. She’d broken the rules – her rules – ventured out into the world, where the sickness could get her, all because she wanted some cereal that wasn’t stale, all because she’d wanted to walk into a goddamn grocery store and run her hands along the shelves. She’d almost made it, too. She was at the front of the store, with her groceries up on the conveyer belt, exclaiming to the clerk, who could not give less of a shit, that she had finally, finally made it, when the smoke stung her nostrils. 

When her skin started to smoke Amanda had screamed. Not because of the pain (that would come in a minute) but because for a moment she’d thought she’d escaped. It hadn’t mattered. The fire had gotten her. As real to her as it really had been scorching her skin.

She’d stumbled out into the parking lot, her last thought to get away from the clerk, who had been rude but hadn’t deserved to burn alive, and felt her body go up in a blaze. 

There is agony, and then there is agony, Amanda knows this. She’s long since given up ranking her episodes. Long since given up rationalizing with herself if she’d rather be frozen or drowned, rather have her soap turn into ants or the dishwater turn into needles, but that day, as she lay writhing on the asphalt, the smoke of imaginary fire scalding her lungs, she was sure there was no other pain. Nothing but this.

And then they had come. There was a moment when she was alone, and then the moment when they were there, and then she was never alone again. They had stood over her, shielded her from the staring civilians, encircled her with their rubber-soled boots and performed their strange magic.

Amanda knows pain. It’s sunk its teeth into her bones. She’ll never get used to deliverance.

The Rowdy 3 were chaos. They were carnage personified. They were the most beautiful thing Amanda had ever seen. 

What do you do when your guardian angels turn out to be a quad of physic vampires? In Amanda’s case, you traveled the country with them. After all, they had already given her a jacket. It was only fair. 

Amanda finally unbraids their names by the time they reach California – and only because she wants to know for sure which is which before she gets her tattoo. 

They’d found the parlor on one of the sketchier streets of the small beachfront town, which was how The 3 liked it. Vogel had held her hand, and Martin and Cross and Gripps had stood by her side, and when the tattoo needle pierced all the way through her arm the Rowdy 3 had smashed the shop to pieces while the shocked artist cowered behind the counter. It wasn’t fair. It had made Amanda feel a little better. Martin, and she knew it was Martin now, with his shock of blond hair and ice chip eyes, had finished the tattoo himself, in the back of the van with the other three standing century. 

The tattoo gun buzzed under Martin’s fingers and Amanda felt her skin vibrate and the lines came away a little shaky (because none of the three could hold still for very long, but for her they did their best) but then it was done, and she was no worse for wear. She never forgot which was which again.

When Martin was done, he had lifted her in his arms, and Vogel and Cross and Gripps had roared around them until Amanda had added her voice to the fray and Martin had spun her around and around before pressing his lips to her head, like she was something precious and their names were inked fresh on her arm and she was home.

The next night, when the van started crushing her, they were there. And the one after that, when all of the water in the world had burned up and she was dying of thirst, they stood around her in a huddle until her skin remembered it was skin again. After, they took her to the ocean.

They left the van parked haphazardly on the dunes, doors flung open, engine barely cooled, because who would be stupid enough to steal the murder van? (They kind of hoped someone would be stupid enough to steal the murder van). They ran screaming down the beach. Vogel did back spring after back spring, and Cross and Gripps beat their chests bruised and Amanda laughed and laughed and laughed.

Their shirts came off like so much shed skin, strewn on the beach like molted shells, and Amanda could see that they were freer under the moonlight, that the animals of their bodies were closer to the sky, like with one breath they might leave their skin entirely. 

The night was in her hair and on her bare arms and Amanda knew she was never sleeping again. Never living in any other moment except when Martin took her hand on one side, and Gripps on the other and Cross and Vogel were already terrorizing the surf and she tightened her fingers and ran.

The ocean was nothing but waves and foam as The 3 tore through the surf, shredding the water to ribbons. They out-ran the tide, out-roared the waves, bellowed gleeful chaos at the sky. Which, in its own, dazzling way, shouted back. 

For a moment there was only sea spray and the rushing of wind, and then Cross was in front of her, heaving an armful of water at Amanda’s bare shoulders and Vogel was behind Cross, running to leap up onto his back and take him down into the water.

Sand sucked at her feet and the tide pulled at Amanda’s legs and for a moment she wasn’t afraid of anything in the entire world. What could compete with this?

When the tingling began, Amanda froze. The air left the beach. There was no sound, no wind, just her and her fear. She had been certain it wouldn’t be able to find her here. The familiar panic dug claws in her skull. 

She let out a groan, whirled, tried to find perchance, and there they were. Martin, the surf up to his knees, put a hand on her shoulder. Gripps took her painted fingers in his. Vogel slipped from Cross’s back and the two stood on either side. 

In the ocean, in the middle of the night, with waves beating down and the air swirling around her face, Amanda breathed. The 3 stood around her, for once still. Water splashed up her thighs, still water. Air brushed her face, still air. Amanda breathed and breathed and breathed.

The three sheltered Amanda. The moment held them. And then it passed. 

Amanda put her hands on Vogel’s chest and shoved. Cross whooped, delighted. Martin lunged forward, hoisting Amanda up on his shoulder and wading deeper into the tide. She screamed, delighted, a laugh so loud it shattered the sky, as a wave crested, then broke over them, and Martin pitched her in.

Water closed over Amanda’s head as it had all those times on dry land and she felt a laugh escape her throat, bubbles shooting up to break towards the sky. She kicked out, hooking Martin’s leg with her own and brining him down with her, hearing Gripps’ delighted yell even below water, and she was glad. 

They ran the surf ragged until they could run no more, until even The 3’s boundless, endless energy was bartered to the sky and the waves, and their bodies vibrated beneath their skin with slightly less intensity, which was as close as any of them ever got to tired, as close as they ever got to human. Amanda would have them no other way.

Amanda came out of the ocean exhausted and soaked though, one arm around Cross and the other around Vogel. The moon painted them all silver. It roved down Martin’s bare shoulders, skated over the knife of his collarbone and caught in the white of his hair, and when he held out his hand, she took it. He pulled her up the beach, pulled her from the waves, up to where the sand still held the heat of the sun.

One-by-one, The 3 collected their shed shirts, draping them across her damp shoulders until she was wrapped in their names. Until she was Martin and Vogel and Cross and Gripps, and she read the names off the list on her arm and they hissed hers back to her, giving her the gift of herself. 

Amanda felt she could peel out her skin. Not in the horrific way she sometimes felt she was losing her skin, but that she could become something new. She was who she was, and she would always be that way. But here, with The 3, she was something else, too. Amanda leaned back her head, and howled at the sky. The 3 added their voices to hers in a deafening cacophony, so that the beach filled with the sound of every emotion in the world ripping from bare chests.

Amanda yelled, and yelled, and yelled until her voice disappeared from her chest and all that was left was the burning ember of her breath.

They lay out on the dunes, under a raging sky bristling with stars. The 3’s skin was bare to the wind and Amanda shoulders were shrouded in leather and plaid, flannel and denim. 

Amanda shivered against the wind and Martin scooped her to him, laying her out against his side so that one half of her was shrouded with heat and the other was braced with a shock of cold, and through it all Amanda felt herself wordlessly, joyously burning alive. She felt she could light up the whole night, the whole town, the whole world. 

When she laughed, her voice was rich with fire and warmth and all good things. Martin leaned down and drank the laughter from her lips, giving her back his own, and Amanda felt herself growing drunk with it. It was better than the first clear breath after an attack, better than the moment she had first stepped foot into the grocery store, better even then when she had returned safely home again. 

Amanda could count on her hand the few truly good moments she had had in her life and now this ruined all of them. She wanted nothing more than to live out her life here, under the stars, with her four rowdy boys around her, as the black of the night threatened never to turn to morning again. She had never known it was possible to be this happy, to be this much herself.

Vogel crawled across the sand to her, Gripps following, and Cross slinking forward on the other side of Martin. Nothing could keep them apart from each other. Vogel’s side pressed into hers. She felt Cross and Gripps add their bodies to the mass, felt Martin’s hand in her’s, felt the moment they all went up in flame, until they were burning, burning, burning. 

Amanda’s laugh scorched the sky gold.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments give me life! Tell me what you think!


End file.
